This version of BitKeeper also required that certain meta-information about changes be stored on computer servers operated by Bitmover (www.openlogging.org), an addition that makes it impossible for community version users to run projects of which Bitmover is unaware.

Although BitMover decided to provide free commercial BitKeeper licenses to some kernel developers, it refused to give or sell licenses to anyone employed by OSDL, including Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton, placing OSDL developers in the same position other kernel developers were in.

A sophisticated distributed system, BitKeeper competes largely against other professional systems such as (Click link for more info and facts about Rational ClearCase) Rational ClearCase and Perforce.

This version of BitKeeper also required that certain meta-information about changes be stored on computer servers operated by Bitmover (), an addition which means that it is impossible for users of the community version to run projects of which Bitmover is unaware.

Although BitMover, Inc. will be providing free commercial BitKeeper licenses to some kernel developers, it is refusing to give or sell licenses to anyone employed by OSDL, including (Click link for more info and facts about Linus Torvalds) Linus Torvalds and (Click link for more info and facts about Andrew Morton) Andrew Morton.

BitKeeper's powerful peer-to-peer model is one of the key contributors to the efficiency of the Linux kernel development.

Customers have found that BitKeeper allows their development teams to be more productive by streamlining the development process and improving time to market without sacrificing code quality.

BitKeeper provides the industry's only peer-to-peer collaborative development tool that fosters best practices in development through powerful workflow capabilities, giving managers absolute control over their projects, and increasing an engineer’s productivity through best-in-class merge technology.

BitKeeper is a commercial version control system by BitMover Inc. It comes in pay or lease licensing, where lease allows you to receive upgrades.

BitKeeper is a very powerful, capable and reliable version control system, that supports copies, moves and renames, atomic commits, changesets, distributed repositories and propagation of changesets, 3-way merging, etc. It is portable to all major UNIX flavours, and to Win32.

BitKeeper used to be utilized by many of the Linux Kernel developers, for managing the kernel source.

better-scm.berlios.de /bk (352 words)

The Suitability of BitKeeper and bkbits.net for Free Software Projects(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)

The free use of BitKeeper requires that the comments attached to the changesets be sent by E-mail to OpenLogging.

As someone who relied on the BitKeeper support to ask some questions on BitKeeper and to receive support for some initial problems I had in setting it up, I can say that Larry McVoy and the other BitMover employees, are in general very friendly and helpful to free users.

In short, the BitKeeper license is not suitable for use by most open- source developers, even if they are not "idealistic" enough to refrain from using a package that deviates from the Open Source Definition, and the Free Software Definitions so much.

better-scm.berlios.de /bk/bk_suitability.html (1533 words)

Feature: No More Free BitKeeper(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)

BitKeeper was first utilized by a Linux project in December of 1999, when it was employed by the Linux PowerPC project.

BitKeeper was made available freely under the latter definition, allowing free and open sourcesoftware developers to use the tool without having to pay any money.

BitKeeper is focused on improving this functionality as it is common for commercial uses, whereas an open source solution concerned with the Linux kernel wouldn't have such a need.

But licensing-related arguments against Bitkeeper aren't very compelling because non-Bitkeeper users haven't been penalized: as long as Bitkeeper use isn't required for Linux kernel development, the free software world is hardly "in crisis" as some have argued, any more than it would be if many Linux developers preferred to use fancy proprietary text editors.

Bitkeeper supports a hierarchy of repositories, with changes propagated from lower-level repositories to upper-level repositories through a variety of channels.

Although a changeset-oriented source control tool is useful in many contexts (offline development on a laptop and private branches of a project, to name two), the pyramid development model which motivates it is a fundamentally poor way to run a project.

BitKeeper was designed with the maintainer model in mind, to enable that model (among others) by removing some of the repeated work such as merging.

BitKeeper is enough better at merging that it allows the model described above to work and to scale into the hundreds or thousands of developers.

Without BitKeeper doing a lot of the grunt work, a project has to choose between the faster commercial model and the more careful maintainer model, but with BitKeeper you get to have your cake and eat it too.

There is a basic part of how BitKeeper and Teamware work that I've been drawing pictures of for 10 years, the part about how it handles parallel development without losing information when the replicas come back together.

BitKeeper is a substantially more complete product than Teamware, it handles more of the corner cases.

kerneltrap.org /node.php?id=222 (8243 words)

[No title](Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)

There are many projects hosted in BitKeeper, including the Linux kernel, the MySQL database, the Xaraya content management project, the ReiserFS project, the Open Zaurus project, the NTP time management system, and the Xen Virtual Machine project, to name a few.

It is impossible to count all BitKeeper users but from the logs here and on bkbits.net we know that there more than 50,000 users world wide.

A project which is stored in BitKeeper may be replicated many times (we've seen upwards of 10,000 replicas of the Linux kernel for example).

Bitkeeper was adopted after widespread complaints about how Linux leader Linus Torvalds was keeping up with the patches sent to him; its adoption prompted even more complaints because the software is not Open Source or Free.

As problematic as Bitkeeper's license was, however, it solved a much bigger problem, which was the lack of a Free or Open Source alternative that could come near Bitkeeper's capabilities.

At the time Bitkeeper was selected, the self-styled pragmatists weren't interested in worrying about the license behind a needed tool, and they were even less interested in building an open source alternative.

The client provides the same functionality as the update command in CVS, i.e., it may be used to track the changes to a project maintained in BitKeeper.

BitKeeper increases productivity at companies ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 50, with more than 60,000 seats deployed worldwide.

BitKeeper provides the industry's only peer-to-peer collaborative development tool that fosters best practices in development through powerful workflow capabilities, enabling off-shore collaborative development, giving managers absolute control over their projects, and increasing an engineer's productivity through best-in-class merge technology.

BitKeeperSoftware: The complete set of executable programs and any accompanying files, such as documentation, known as the BitKeeperSoftware.

Single user BitKeeper Packages: One or more BitKeeper Packages wherein all changes to all files are made by the same per- son and the total number of unique files over all Bit- Keeper Packages does not exceed 1000.

Use of the BitKeeperSoftware without a license is a violation of copyrights held by BitMover on the BitKeeperSoftware.

When BitKeeper exports the source code to other servers, it checks the integrity of every file, matching a digital fingerprint of its official version of the file with the version on the remote machine.

A critical security flaw was found in CVS in January, but it's unknown whether the attacker used the vulnerability to gain access to the CVS database.

BitKeeper's McVoy hopes the current incident will quash objections raised by some members of the development who don't want to add a new feature that would require all changes to be digitally signed.

BitKeeper keeps state about each file under source control and knows what changes have been made since the last time each tree was synchronized.

Improvements BitKeeper provides over rsync include elimination of reverse updates (synchronizing in the wrong direction and losing your changes), automerging algorithms optimized for source code (so trees can be updated in parallel and then synchronized), and intelligent handling of metadata operations such as renaming of files (which rsync sees as deletion and creation of files).

Compare-by-hash still has applications in areas where statelessness and low bandwidth are more important than correctness of data referenced, and users are aware of the risk they are taking, as in rsync.

Every time I have to sit and use CVS though I am reminded about what a piece of junk it is. No messages per file, no GUI to tell me what files I am missing, and everything has to be in one central repository.

Having never used BitKeeper, my loose impression is that it's likely better than Perforce, but Perforce is just so amazingly better than CVS that I can't imagine going back.

One key BitKeeper advantage is it's good at maintaining cooperating repositories; one example of this is the Linux kernel developers each hosting their own development branch, importing changeset by changeset.

www.livejournal.com /users/krow/336023.html (727 words)

[No title](Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)

The message is that we have gone beyond optional usage of Bitkeeper here, and it is now an absolute requirement, or it is on the way there.

Separate source trees -are the means in BitKeeper by which you delineate parallel lines -of development, both minor and major.

BitKeeper -requires that changesets maintain a certain order, which is the reason -that "bk push" sends all local changesets the remote doesn't have.

Now that the dust has settled, and intrigued by a press release from Bitkeeper author Larry McVoy that claimed impressive productivity gains for Linus Torvalds and other kernel hackers using Bitkeeper, NewsForge decided it was time to talk with McVoy on the current state of affairs between the free software hackers and his proprietary code.

That means that we, the employees and owners of BitKeeper, decide if it is a good idea to support the kernel and the other free users.

Along with BitKeeper itself, we provide bkbits.net, a free hosting service for BK repositories (Linux is there, MySQL is there, so are lots of other projects), and we provide a free public server (kernel.bkbits.net) that anyone can use if they are working on the kernel, BK user or not.

BitKeeperSoftware: The complete set of executable pro- grams and any accompanying files, such as documenta- tion, known as the BitKeeperSoftware.

Single user BitKeeper Package: A BitKeeper Package wherein all changes to all files are made by the same person and the total number of files does not exceed 1000.

Conforming Software: BitKeeperSoftware that: (i) passes all of the current, unmodified, regression tests for the BitKeeperSoftware; (ii) performs all licensing functions, such as Open Log- ging, identically to the current version of the Bit- Keeper Software as distributed by BitMover, Inc. 2.

Currently, BitKeeper makes it easy to extract all data and metadata from a repository; moving an entire repository into a different source management system is an easy task.

In the case of BitKeeper, those who chose not to use it are no worse off than they were before, and an easy path is open should a quick evacuation to another source management system be required.

One correction is that Bitkeeper source is available (remeber the flame wars over the fact that bitkeeper required the modified versions to still pass the regression tests that among other things verified that you didn't remove the openlogging portion)

lwn.net /Articles/12120 (5405 words)

[No title](Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)

Remote command execution BitKeeper may be executed in daemon mode then it opens port and listens to incoming requests.

Where BitKeeper beat out other, more traditional management tools such as CVS or Subversion, Torvalds says, was in the system’s ability to process changes at the wholesale level.

Lest such comments be perceived as a reversal of principle on the decision to go with BitKeeper three years ago, Torvalds remains adamant that the decision to build a new open source management tool was a decision forced upon him.